Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to managing information. More specifically, embodiments of the present invention relate to methods and systems for identifying and sharing common trends represented in a corpus of private information without revealing the private information.
An entity providing a hosted service for a plurality of users or customers can maintain a collection of information related to or associated with those users. For example, an acquirer, financial institution, or other entity can provide services supporting a variety of different financial transactions. In order to support these transactions, the acquirer can also maintain a wide range of information for users or customers participating in those transactions such as financial institutions, merchants, and/or other parties to the transactions. Such information can include information about the transactions themselves as well as information such as rules for processing those transactions. Such rules or other information for supporting the transactions can be defined by parties such as financial institutions, merchants, or other entities participating in the transactions. Most of this information is private and/or proprietary and can not to be shared between users or customers of the service.
However, if the entity maintaining such information, e.g., an acquirer, is able to look across the collection of information as a whole, that entity may be able to gain insight into emerging trends represented in the collection of information. Furthermore, even abstracted information related to this insight, without details of the private information from which it is formed, may be helpful to users or customers of the service. That is, a notice of the trend, even in the abstract and without sharing the details of the private information, may be useful. Hence, there is a need in the art for improved methods and systems for identifying and sharing common trends represented in a corpus of private information without revealing the private information.